2015 Fundraising Results and Donor Stats

February 01, 2016

2015 was a big deal for New Harvest because it was the first time we had to deliver on a restricted donation.

The restricted donation was made at the end of 2014 by a small group of New Harvest supporters who wanted to make the most effective donation. With lots of back and forth between the donors and me, we arrived at the conclusion that the most effective donation to New Harvest would be one year of full-time salary for a Development Director.

A Development Director is the senior fundraising manager of a non-profit. For New Harvest, it would also be the second employee, meaning that fundraising was just one of the many things that someone at a tiny organization gets to do.

In December, we started looking. By mid-March, Gilonne d’Origny had joined New Harvest as Development Director. Gilonne technically didn’t have a classic non-profit fundraising background, but then again, I technically didn’t have a classic non-profit management background either. But that’s all fine because New Harvest is far from a classic non-profit.

Gilonne did an incredible job.

In 2015, New Harvest raised a total of $545,435.78 from 504 donations.

Total donated dollars received by New Harvest per year, for 2013, 2014 and 2015. Data from NationBuilder.

This is pretty awesome because it means we raised 2.3 times what we raised in 2014. It means we raised enough to cover New Harvest’s operations entirely!

Number of donations received, per year for 2013, 2014, and 2015. Data from NationBuilder.

By the way, I’m looking back to 2013 because that’s when New Harvest began with its first full time employee (me).

In 2015, New Harvest received from 190 different donors, 124 of which had never given to New Harvest before.

Number of unique donors who gave to New Harvest each year, for 2013, 2014, and 2015, further broken down into new donors and those returning from a previous year. Data from NationBuilder.

This year we had more donations than ever before, from a greater number of donors than ever before. To me the most exciting was the number of new donors.

In 2015, 124 people donated to New Harvest for the first time. This means 35% of all people who have ever given to New Harvest donated for the first time in 2015. (New Harvest has received donations from a total of 351 different donors).

Our donors live in 19 different countries.

The tool we use to track our donations has this awesome mapping function which allows us to see where donors are based, according to the geographical data they provide.

Because New Harvest is a charity only registered in the US, as expected, most of our donors are from North America.

Looking more closely, we can see we have support from both coasts as well as the Mid-West, with a few supporters in Canada.

In addition to our main donor base in North America, we have donors in 17 additional countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Here's the breakdown of donors per country.

*4 of the 190 donors from this year did not have adequate geographical data to include them in this breakdown.

The majority of our 2015 donors are male

We do not collect gender data but NationBuilder does sync Facebook and Twitter accounts if our donors also follow us on those forms of social media.

In a totally non-precise, rough, and binary way, I assigned either male or female to our donor list based on first names and/or profile photos. I was curious to see what the breakdown might be. Was it approximately split? Far from it.

It turns out that 57 of our donors are female while 125 of our donors are male (8 donors had too little data to make an assumption one way or the other). That means we have over twice as many male donors as female. This exaggerated split was pretty surprising to me, though I am not sure what the data might look like for other organizations.

We’re on our way, and it's thanks to you

I think it’s safe to say that we did a great job fundraising this year, and without question our new Development Director Gilonne played a key role. Not only are New Harvest’s operations finally secure, we’re also in a better position than ever to fund groundbreaking research in cellular agriculture.

Big, big, shout out to all 190 donors who contributed this year! You know you who are. We couldn’t be advancing the post-animal bioeconomy without you.

Written by Isha Datar

Note: All data comes from NationBuilder, our donor management system. Discrepancies between this information and information on our Form 990 may arise from things like cheque dates vs. cheque deposit dates.